February ninth, 2023 
Researchers at Kyung Hee College in South Korea have developed a voice-activated DNA pattern pre-treatment machine to help clinicians coping with outbreaks of infectious illness to remain safer. Coping with extremely infectious affected person samples places clinicians and lab technicians in danger. Minimizing pattern dealing with and publicity is necessary in decreasing the danger of transmission, and a system that may carry out a few of these steps robotically, and not using a clinician even having to work together with it bodily can facilitate this. One other utility is to permit biomedical scientists with a incapacity which may preclude them from the fiddly work of dealing with small volumes of liquid to carry out assays utilizing simply their voice.
The pandemic has highlighted the truth that healthcare workers regularly put themselves in hurt’s technique to care for his or her sufferers. That is admirable and generally crucial, however know-how that may assist to scale back the danger to healthcare workers must be pursued to permit them to carry out their work with a minimal of fear.
This newest know-how goals to scale back healthcare workers publicity to probably infectious affected person samples and takes its inspiration from the voice-activated sensible audio system which might be widespread in lots of houses. Furthermore, voice-activation and automatic pattern dealing with additionally has advantages for scientists and lab technicians who might have a incapacity, similar to visible impairment or dexterity points that make dealing with of biomedical assays difficult.
The system consists of a microfluidic chip with chambers for liquid samples which might be related with six 3-way solenoid valves. These valves are activated by a microcontroller that’s Bluetooth managed. The voice-recognition comes within the type of a related smartphone app. There are a sequence of pre-determined phrases that the person can utter out loud, and every of those instructions is then relayed to the machine over Bluetooth.
The present iteration of the machine is conceived as processing DNA samples from pathogenic micro organism which were remoted from sufferers for additional evaluation and identification. The microcontroller throughout the machine can coordinate numerous pattern preparation steps, together with pattern washing, loading, and assortment of the ultimate purified bacterial DNA.
Examine in journal ACS Sens: Function of the Speech Recognition of the Smartphone to Automatically Operate a Portable Sample Pretreatment Microfluidic System
By way of: American Chemical Society
